De Sylva hates drive-through queues so much that he decided to calculate the gas burned and tonnes of carbon dioxide spewed at Markham's drive-through establishments. His campaign against them started a few years ago, when he noticed that many coffee shops paid more attention to car driver customers at the window than customers who walked through the door.
It annoyed him, and he decided to do some analysis, starting with plotting the location of all of Markham's drive-ins: Burger and doughnut restaurants, banks, drug stores – anything with a drive-through window. He found 29. Then in April and May he dispatched employee Alison Christou to do the painstaking work of counting cars at sample drive-through lines and measuring their progress with a stop-watch.
"I was amazed at what I found," says de Sylva. By his calculation, which was based on a formula used by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the cars lined up at Markham's 29 drive-through establishments uselessly burn 435,185 litres of gasoline a year. That's enough to let an average car circle the globe 85 times.
As for greenhouse gas emissions, de Sylva calculates the damage at 118 tonnes of carbon dioxide and other pollutants. "It's my atmosphere as much as anybody else's," says de Sylva. His objective on drive-throughs is simple: "I think they should stop them." De Sylva acknowledges that for many of his three-plus decades as a property developer, he built low-density suburban subdivisions, the kind that spawned the car culture that led to drive-through service. He has now turned to developing higher density, multiple-unit buildings with features like geothermal heating, rooftop solar arrays and wind-powered water heaters.
Nick Javor, a spokesperson for Tim Hortons, says de Sylva's analysis is flawed. Tim Hortons hired its own consulting firm, RWDI AIR Inc., to calculate emissions for cars in the drive-through lane and the parking lot at its own stores. That study – which compared the emissions caused by drive-through idling compared with those produced when a car crawls through a parking lot, manoeuvres into a space, stops, restarts and crawls back out – concluded there is "no air quality benefit to the public from eliminating drive-throughs." It found that hourly emissions for locations with drive-throughs were lower than for those with only parking lots; it was the same result with small congested lots and larger free-flowing ones.
Okay, fine, whatever. There is a way to have the best of both. It starts with the promised legislation and ends with a Zenn-like moment.
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